Chemistry track

We know that a recipe works, but why? Show us the science behind the recipe. Explain the components of a project and how they interact.
Explore how our technology works on the lowest levels, and what that can teach us about optimal use. Tell us your analysis and profiling techniques, how implementation affects function, and what a kernel is made of. Example topics from the past include “OSWALD: Lessons from and for the Open Hardware Movement” and “Doing NoSQL with SQL.”

Sessions for this track

Have you heard about functional programming but not sure what all the fuss is about? Learn about the basic concepts of functional programming, writing functions in Scala, and the functional approach to working with collections supported by Scala's collections library. Learn about the benefits of a functional approach to programming even when you're not fully adopting a functional style. Scala is a language that allows mixing the object-oriented and functional approaches. No prior knowledge of Scala is required to enjoy this talk.

Ever wonder what you don't know about how your computer hardware really works? Do you tire of lying to your relatives that "gremlins" are the cause of intermittent data loss and blue screens, and not just a car from the 1970s? Let's take a journey into the wonderful world of wonky hardware and find out what can be done about it!

FirefoxOS is Mozilla's response to the problems that it sees with the mobile space. Walled gardens, platform fragmentation, and single-purpose SDKs in non-web programming languages threaten to close off the open web from the mobile space. In this presentation I will be covering the basics of FirefoxOS, and how it is the only mobile OS that answers to nobody but you.

Thank you! I'm glad someone read the description of this talk on line and remembered to answer Aardvark -- if you hadn't done that, the excerpt wouldn't have actually been part of the talk, and the very fabric of reality could have been threatened!

An exploration of labor and ethics from various points in the life of a computer -- from the day-to-day software programming and hardware inside the computer down to the materials used in various components. Includes the implications for open source hardware and software as well as possible future solutions.

With good study design you can state how confident you are that you have a cat. You can hypothesis test your cat--is my cat like other cats or is it a dog? You can even design an experiment to determine the correct feeding time for your cat.

Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects have been hemorrhaging editors for the past five years. We're going to talk about the reasons why, how they can affect other projects, and what you can do to prevent it in yours.

The Perl Renaissance is in full swing. Join internationally acclaimed speaker and White Camel Award winner Paul Fenwick as we explore some of the most freakin' amazing developments in the land of Perl!

Secure Boot is a technology for limiting the files that computers will boot. Used wrongly, it restricts user freedom and turns computers into appliances. How can we use it for real improvements in security without losing the ideals of general purpose computing?

"Asynchronous" or "non-blocking" frameworks like Tornado and Node.js are in fashion, but most programmers still don't have a rigorous understanding of what's meant by asynchronous, how these frameworks function, and when they're appropriate to use. I'll give a detailed tour of Tornado's event loop and show exactly how it works, and under what circumstances it's superior to a traditional multithreaded web server. You'll learn how to write the most efficient servers for modern apps with very large numbers of concurrent connections.

We're surrounded by programs we didn't write. Inevitably they eventually do the wrong thing, or they just don't do what we need, and we want to find out what they are doing. Learn how to spy on the processes you run.

Private cloud computing has become an integral part of global business. While each platform provides a way for virtual machines to be deployed, implementations vary widely. It can be difficult to determine which features are right for your needs. This presentation will discuss the top open source private cloud platforms against Ganeti and provide analysis on which one is the best fit for you.

How can you avoid servers and get back to coding? Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) makes deployment easy. But which PaaS do you choose and how do you get started? This talk will examine several of the leading PaaS providers and discuss their pros/cons. We'll also give examples for how to deploy the same app to each of them to see the differences.

The Scribunto ("They shall write") extension for MediaWiki allows wiki users to write Lua code to process and display text and data in articles. Learn why Wikimedia chose Lua, how it is integrated into our PHP-based web app, and what results have been seen since the deployment in March.

The age of REST is in full swing for building a modern app but it's starting to show strain: increased development complexity across multiple APIs, managing state in mobile apps, and a reliance on centralizing services to solve problems.

libgit2 is Git re-imagined as thread-safe library instead of a collection of command-line scripts, possibly written by the Elder Gods themselves. This talk will describe why that is so important and the various technologies it will enable in the near future in embedded and mobile devices.

pt-table-checksum is a free tool which safely and efficiently verifies that data on MySQL replicas is identical to the master. Having inconsistent data on MySQL replicas is a well-known and rather common problem, yet many people who depend on MySQL replication never check for it. Moreover, inconsistent data can be an expensive problem, but the solution is free: pt-table-checksum.

Open-source software is available to bring surveys, rankings, ratings, polls, and organizational elections into the digital era. Yet far too often websites and organizations use voting methods that are no better than the single-mark ballots we use in governmental elections. Alas, when innovative developers take the DIY approach, the results are usually disastrous.

When was the last time you looked at some Perl code? Was it readable? Was it like an archeological expedition, traveling back in time to 1994? Modern Perl is very different from the Perl of our ancestors, and if you've been away for a while, the tools that are available now will blow your mind.